In 2011, Western New York lost two of its greatest scientific
minds: Wilson Greatbatch, inventor of the implantable pacemaker,
and Herbert Hauptman, a Nobel laureate whose methods for
deciphering the shapes of molecules propelled the development of
modern pharmaceuticals.

Greatbatch, 92, died on Sept. 27. Hauptman, 94, died on Oct.
23.

During their long and distinguished careers, both served on
UB’s faculty and conducted research with UB colleagues. The
two were friends, and no wonder. Each was a man of ideas, of
limitless curiosity. Each believed in the power of science to
change lives. Each solved problems that men and women of their
generation once thought were impossible.

Friends at UB remember Hauptman and Greatbatch for their
intellect and bold achievements, and also for their generosity.
Each man was an inspiration because he not only lived his own
dreams, but encouraged others to do the same.

The world was full of things that were broken, and Wilson
Greatbatch spent a lifetime fixing them. His appearance was
orderly—
he wore a coat and bow tie, and combed his hair back—but his
mind was a place where anything could happen. He was a man of
ideas, many of them extraordinary.

Endlessly curious, he approached even day-to-day problems with a
scientific framework. On one occasion, he tracked down scientist
Esther Takeuchi in the research division of his company, Greatbatch
Inc.

“I need a pH meter,” he told her.

He was using chicken manure to fertilize his garden and the
droppings were causing his pitchfork to corrode. He needed the pH
meter to measure the acidity of the soil so that he could find a
way to stop the deterioration.

Takeuchi, now a UB faculty member, smiles as she recounts the
story.

"I miss him," she says. "The world is a sadder place for him
having passed away."

No problem was too small for Greatbatch to address. Likewise, no
problem was too huge. The one the world will remember him for
solving was enormous: In the 1950s, he invented the implantable
cardiac pacemaker, a life-saving device that uses electrical
impulses to regulate the heartbeat of patients whose hearts are
pumping too fast, too slow or erratically.

A humble tinkerer who saw the hand of God in human works,
Greatbatch came across his most famous discovery by chance.

It was 1956 and he was an assistant professor and master’s
student in UB’s electrical engineering
department. While building a device for recording heart sounds,
he grabbed the wrong resistor from a box full of them. When he
installed the part, the circuit he was constructing emitted a
broken pulse.

Other scientists might have missed the significance. But
Greatbatch recognized the pattern at once: It was an electrical
rhythm capable of driving a heart.

“The thing went ‘blip’ and then it waited a
second and then it went ‘blip’ again,” Greatbatch
said years later, recalling the moment in a video
interview. “And I said, ‘Oh my good heavens. What
did I do? I’ve got to tear it apart.’ And then I looked
at it again and said, ‘Oh that’s a
pacemaker.’”

External pacemakers that drew power from electrical outlets
existed in the 1950s, but Greatbatch believed he could embed his
circuit into a device small enough to implant.

The next few years flew by in a whirlwind of invention.

In the wood-heated barn in Clarence, N.Y., that served as his
workshop, Greatbatch fashioned 50 prototypes that doctors then
implanted into animals and humans. His primary partners on the
project were a pair of surgeons at Buffalo’s Veterans Affairs
Medical Center: William Chardack and Andrew Gage, the latter of
whom would go on to serve as a UB medical professor for more than
40 years.

At the time, the thought of burying a gadget in a
patient’s chest was radical. But the idea caught on and a
company called Medtronic licensed and began manufacturing the
Chardack-Greatbatch pacemaker, to great success.

The device turned out to be the first of many inventions for a
man who later would tell lecture halls full of UB students to keep
their minds open to far-fetched ideas: Nine out of 10 things he
tried didn’t work, Greatbatch would counsel, but the 10th
paid for the rest.

In science, as in his private life, Greatbatch was no agnostic.
He had strong opinions about right and wrong, and believed that
people should use their talents to help others. What mattered most
was not money or recognition, but doing good.

That philosophy was deeply ingrained at Wilson Greatbatch
Ltd.—the predecessor to Greatbatch Inc.—which
Greatbatch established in 1970 to develop longer-lived batteries
for medical devices.

Brimming with ideas and curiosity, Greatbatch would walk the
halls, querying researchers about their experiments and telling
them about his own. He welcomed risk-taking in science—a
notion sometimes difficult for companies to embrace. He knew
employees by name and decided that the company would pay for the
children of any worker to go to any college they wanted.

Wilson Greatbatch, inventor of the implantable pacemaker

“If I demand to be paid for what I do, whether it be in
the form of money or peer approval, I’m asking to be paid for
what I feel is an act of love. The reward isn’t in the
results. It’s in the doing.”

— Wilson Greatbatch in 1995 in R&D Innovator

Greatbatch Inc.

Greatbatch Inc., a leader in
the design, development and manufacture of components for
implantable medical devices, is one of UB’s strongest
business partners. Founded by famed inventor Wilson Greatbatch, the
company has supported UB research, employed UB graduates and
provided mentoring for UB students. In 2009, Greatbatch Inc.
received UB’s Vital Partner Award in recognition of the
firm’s longtime collaboration with the university.

“He really believed that the company and the employees
were on a mission—that our goal was to develop good products
that helped the patients and that did right by society,” says
Takeuchi, who became a notable inventor in her own right while
working there for 22 years. When she left Greatbatch Inc. to join
UB in 2007, the firm provided some financial support for her
university work.

By the end of his life, Greatbatch had accumulated more than 325
patents. He adapted a long-lived lithium-iodine battery for
pacemaker use, studied ways to battle cancer and AIDS, and crafted
a solar-powered canoe that he sailed on the Finger Lakes for his
72nd birthday.

Starting in 1994 and continuing for 16 years, he visited UB
annually to share his love of invention during the Engineering
Career Institute, a course that helps aspiring engineers navigate
the transition from school to industry. In the end, blind and
losing his hearing, but still sharp, Greatbatch would come in using
a walker, said Dean Millar, who teaches the class.

Greatbatch was born in an era when films were silent and
telephones had only recently become popular. But all his life, he
embraced new technologies, teaching himself to use a computer long
before the machines were commonplace.

One of his last great projects was promoting nuclear fusion as a
source of clean energy. The method he preferred required a
non-radioactive isotope of helium called “helium-3.”
Helium 3 is rare on Earth, but is thought to exist in large
deposits on the moon.

For men with narrower minds, this might have posed an
insurmountable challenge. But for the man who dreamed up the
implantable pacemaker, the answer was simple: “We need to set
up a space station on the moon,” he told a magazine
interviewer in the 1990s.

Where others saw problems, Greatbatch saw solutions. The world
was better for it.

Curiosity and a true passion for innovation led Wilson
Greatbatch to become one of the greatest inventors of our time. In
this video from the Lemelson Foundation, meet Greatbatch.

When he told the story of how he calculated the circumference of
the Earth, Herbert Aaron Hauptman would light up with wonder.

It was an old experiment he replicated: Using only simple tools
and the impressive computing power of his mind, he recorded
the slightly different times of sunset at two locations on a beach
and used that data to deduce the dimensions of the planet.

It was simple geometry. But to Hauptman, it was astonishing.
Throughout his life, he appreciated the world on a mathematical
level, said George DeTitta, a friend and structural biologist at
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI) and UB.

As a child, Hauptman searched for order in classical music and
delighted in the patterns he discovered. Later, as a mathematician
at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he turned his
attention to decrypting another enigma: the structures of molecular
crystals.

The work was in a field called “crystallography,”
and Hauptman excelled in it.

At the time, scientists knew that when a crystal was struck with
an X-ray beam, the beam would scatter, forming a distinctive
pattern. In 1953, Hauptman and chemist Jerome Karle published a
monograph showing it was possible to invert that
relationship—to use the X-ray diffractions to divine the
atomic structures of molecules within a crystal.

Using mathematical probability theory, Hauptman and Karle
devised equations that translated the patterns into a molecular map
showing the precise positions of every atom. The finding was
revolutionary, not least because the shapes of molecules dictate
how they work in life-saving drugs.

Initially, however, the mathematical tools that Hauptman and
Karle created were met with hostility. Many crystallographers did
not believe what the partners had achieved could be done. At the
Naval Research Laboratory, Hauptman’s superiors began pushing
him to change his focus.

“They wanted him to turn the laser into a killing weapon
and he didn’t have any desire to turn the laser into a
killing weapon,” says Bill Duax, a structural biologist at
HWI and UB who remembers Hauptman as a die-hard liberal who visited
schools in developing countries to teach his methods.

In 1970, Duax traveled to see Hauptman in Washington, D.C., with
Dorita Norton, the research director of the Medical Foundation of
Buffalo, a small, nonprofit biomedical research institute where
Duax worked.

Over slices of pecan pie made by Hauptman’s wife, Edith,
the three discussed Hauptman’s career. The conversation
helped convince Hauptman to move north later that year. In Buffalo,
he joined UB’s biophysical
sciences faculty and the institute, succeeding Norton as
research director in 1972.

With Hauptman in the lead, colleagues with different expertise
worked together to advance crystallography. Duax, who had an eye
for pattern recognition, hunted for patterns in X-ray diffractions,
which are recorded on film as spots of light of varying intensity.
DeTitta, a postdoctoral fellow Hauptman hired in 1973, helped
convert Hauptman’s hand-written notes into computerized
algorithms for solving molecular structures.

Confirmation of the work’s importance came the morning of
Oct. 16 in 1985. Hauptman was swimming at the YMCA when Duax
phoned: Hauptman and Karle had won the Nobel Prize in
chemistry.

“We celebrated,” remembers Duax, who bought
champagne and caviar for the occasion. He smiles.
“We’re still celebrating.”

With the Nobel Prize, requests poured in asking Hauptman to
appear as a guest speaker. During a talk with UB’s graduate
group in advanced scientific computing, Hauptman wrote a large
equation on the board. Chalk dust flying, he told the audience that
solving the equation would solve a central problem in
crystallography.

The words caught the attention of Russ Miller, a young UB
professor who had co-founded the advanced computing group and would
go on to found UB's Center for
Computational Research. After Hauptman’s lecture, Miller
approached DeTitta to discuss the presentation. What followed was
one of the most exciting and fruitful times of the
scientists’ careers.

Leveraging Miller’s skills in supercomputing, a team that
included Hauptman, David Langs, Charles Weeks and DeTitta cracked
important mysteries in crystallography. They used high-end
computing systems to solve the equation Hauptman had chalked, in
effect devising ways to apply Hauptman’s mathematical tools
to deciphering the shapes of ever-larger molecules.

Herbert Aaron Hauptman, Nobel Prize-winning crystallographer

“All I had to hear was that here was a problem that no
one could solve…that was even impossible to solve in
principle. Once I heard that, then there was no letting
go.”

— Herbert A. Hauptman in 2008 on WNED-TV

Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI)

Hauptman-Woodward Medical
Research Institute(HWI), an independent,
nonprofit biomedical research institute, is one of UB’s
strongest community partners. Inspired by Nobel laureate Herbert
Hauptman, HWI scientists build understanding of the roots of
disease by studying the structure of molecules. The institute
houses UB’s structural biology department and attracts
scientific talent from around the world to Buffalo.

In 1994, in the midst of this work, the Medical Foundation of
Buffalo was renamed the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research
Institute in honor of Hauptman and Helen Woodward-Rivas, an early
philanthropist.

“It is literally the case that methods that (Hauptman)
developed had an impact on the development of every modern drug
that’s currently out there,” DeTitta says. “The
methods took us from a position where the study of molecules with
more than seven or eight atoms was a tour de force, to the point
where we literally look at structures with tens of thousands of
atoms routinely.”

At the institute, Hauptman created an atmosphere where people
felt they could explore any line of inquiry—however radical,
however extraordinary. Today, the 18 professors and 10 graduate
students in UB’s structural
biology department, which opened at HWI in 2001, are pursuing
not one kind of research, but many.

Some—like DeTitta, who is perfecting techniques for
growing crystals—are toolmakers in Hauptman’s
tradition. Others are studying viral and bacterial pathogens, the
molecules that cause disease. Duax is working with high school
students from Buffalo to investigate whether bacteria that have
existed for 3 billion years may rely on a genetic code simpler than
that of later species. In biology, this is a wild idea, one that
defies all convention.

Hauptman himself continued working into his 90s. His mind
remained sharp; he could still sing “Ode to Joy” in
German and recite large portions of the “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,” both of which he memorized in his youth.

At the institute, with his mane of curly white hair, Hauptman
was hard to miss. He was a man of another generation. He would sit
down with his thoughts, a yellow legal pad and No. 2 pencils. These
were his laboratory. He never learned to use a computer, though
computers were what brought his work to life and gave it utility in
drug design.

He succeeded because he did what he loved and trusted his
colleagues, his friends, to do what they did best.

Herbert Hauptman's courage to challenge conventional wisdom in
crystallography changed the way scientists around the world study
and develop drugs. In this clip from Toward Castle Films and WNED,
meet Hauptman.